Use of Domain Ontologies to Improve Requirements Quality

[Context and motivation] Requirements are of great importance for the development of software systems to document and meet stakeholder needs. Software requirements can be affected by several quality defects during the Requirements Engineering (RE) process, for example ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness. These quality defects lead to incorrect systems, unnecessary system functions, and thus to additional costs and effort. [Question/problem] Domain ontologies (DOs) contain formalized and conceptualized knowledge of real world domains. Existing works show how DOs can be used in RE to improve the quality of requirements wrt. specific quality attributes. During system specification, different specification levels allow explicit decisions about all aspects of the system to be built. It has not been studied so far, how DOs can be used comprehensively on the different levels of system specification and for different quality attributes. [Principal ideas/results] The thesis will provide a conceptual framework for utilizing DOs on different levels of system specification. Throughout all DO-based approaches, several implicit DO utilization patterns exist. The framework relates three dimensions: (i) quality attributes, (ii) DO utilization patterns, and (iii) their impact on the specification level. The framework will be evaluated in combination with a task-oriented RE method and a real project. [Contribution] This paper describes the problem, related work, main solution ideas, the research methodology, and progress so far.